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Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Chumash Basics: Getting Started

In a week of new beginnings and fascinating new subjects, here is the most important: Chumash! Today was our second day and we are basically just reading the first passuk, line by line.

There are a LOT of good resources free on chinuch.org. I decided to start with Parshas Lech Lecha because it’s a very common starting point and there are a lot of resources out there. In fact, I already have the Migdalor workbook for Lech Lecha, though Naomi isn’t quite at the level that she can get any use out of it yet.

Edited to add: There’s also Bright Beginnings, a REALLY nice chumash workbook available for download free from this page.

Even though she’s just barely READING, I wanted to get started on chumash. I’ve been reading a lot from Christian homeschooling parents about teaching their kids to read using the Bible and I figured, why shouldn’t we? She’s reading Hebrew painstakingly anyway – it may as well be a meaningful story… in beautiful, if somewhat convoluted Hebrew.

(aside: I’m so sick of reading about the “Morah” in the “Kitah” in our regular Hebrew lessons!)

Anyway, despite the wealth available at chinuch.org (here’s a sampling of what there is for Lech Lecha), I was looking for a couple of ABSOLUTE-beginner-level things that didn’t exist, and then created them. I’m pretty happy with the way these turned out.

First, a “prefixes” poster I created – kind of an amalgam of two different documents I found on chinuch.org neither of which quite did it for me:

I like the simplicity and visual-ness of this. I’m starting with prefixes and I figure we’ll tackle suffixes later. I also downloaded this prefixes resource and printed the “popcorns” on cardstock so Naomi Rivka can handle them and see them up close. Pics another time when we’re actually using them.

Finally, inspired by these super-expensive Montessori-inspired chumash teaching materials, I wanted to create a series “cut-ups”, though, now that I have done it, I’m not sure I will have her cut them up after all. Here are the first two pesukim of Lech Lecha.

You may notice I didn’t do every single word. I don’t want to get bogged down, and why make her dwell on common words (like “Avram”!) that should come pretty naturally after a passuk or two? I also skipped deconstructing the words “lech lecha” themselves… too complicated for a kid who doesn’t even know “halach” yet.

Anyway, these are the only two so far. At some point, if I put a few together, I will upload these to Chinuch.org. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in a pdf copy of any of these materials, just email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com.

July 14 p.s. I finished the first perek (Lech Lecha Perek 12), and it’s available free as a PDF for the time being!